In fact, only 10 percent of teachers report that advanced students are likely to be taught with curriculum and instruction specially designed for their abilities. In addition, the NAGC survey found that 73 percent of teachers believe that their brightest students are bored and under-challenged and are not given the opportunity to thrive.
Further, 77 percent note that because their focus is helping underachieving students to reach proficiency, the needs of advanced students take a back seat.
Identifying a gifted student is not an exact science. It requires a teacher to have the education and train in gifted education to be able to recognize certain behavioral traits — both positive and negative — that signal a particular student is gifted or has the potential to be a high achiever.
Given the need to identify gifted students, here are some general behavioral traits that children exhibit that can help teachers pinpoint a gifted student:. At the same time, gifted students may also possess the following traits that can negatively affect their learning if their needs are not met:.
Considering the many positive and negative traits, it can be difficult to pinpoint a gifted student. Making sure to approach a student in a way that is non-threatening is key. The key is for your gifted child to feel accepted and loved for who they are.
It can help your child to know that not everyone is the same. If your child hears that you value all children regardless of differences, it can make it easier for your child to get along with and value others too. For example, it might help them to be understanding when other children struggle with maths they find easy.
Your feelings can also be affected by how your child was identified as gifted. If it has come as a surprise to you, you might need time to adjust. It might help to talk about your feelings with someone you trust.
Some parents of gifted children can feel isolated from other parents of children the same age. Above all, your gifted child is a child. The field of gifted education has learned much about how to select students and how to think more broadly about what successful identification looks like.
But there is no magic bullet to solve the problem of inequity in gifted education. Further, state laws and rules vary widely, with some even mandating problematic practices such as extreme test score requirements or national norms Plucker et al. In the meantime, though, we can make significant progress by relying on a number of best practices, as described below.
Establish the purpose. As with any good program, planning is key. At some point, preferably up front, a school must decide on a what or a who. Either it can start with a goal e. An effective identification system can be designed based on either choice.
For example, school leaders often set their gifted criteria at the 95th percentile of a nationwide standardized test, without stopping to think through the implications of that decision.
In effect, though, this is to make a passive choice about the kind of program being offered: Only students who are advanced in math and reading will be selected, leaving out students who are doing high-level work in science, music, or other subjects. Thus, the first and most important rule for identifying students for gifted programs is to set a clear goal from the start, and to set selection criteria on the basis of that goal.
Either the program exists to challenge X students at their level of need and readiness, or it exists to help more kids achieve Y. Focus on needs and services, not labels. When schools provide students with advanced learning opportunities, they need to make sure those are the right opportunities, focusing on the content and the level of work that have been identified as appropriate for those students.
For instance, if students are to be offered an accelerated math class e. This means also that the identification of students for advanced learning opportunities should be seen as temporary and context specific.
Cast a wide net. These were students who, before universal testing, might never have gone to college or even taken the ACT. Of course, it costs more money to test all students and since this will lead to the identification of more students who need advanced learning opportunities expand gifted programs. But if we want to identify students for these services more accurately and equitably, then this is a cost we must bear.
In effect, having identified larger numbers of students to receive services, they try to carve up the pie into smaller and smaller pieces. Inevitably, this leads to conflicts over access to school resources, since every time a new student is identified for these opportunities, another student sees their own opportunities diminish e. When we work with school districts on these issues, we often encourage them to bake a bigger pie, expanding their gifted programs to meet the growing need for such services.
We understand that the complex politics of school funding stand in the way, but we wish more districts would take our advice. Choose the right comparisons. But this makes little sense. At some schools, no students score at this level.
And yet, in every school there are students who perform at a higher lever than their peers and would benefit from an additional challenge. As a rule, each school should design its GT services to meet the needs of its local population, rather than trying to conform to some national perspective on who counts as gifted.
This has two main benefits. First, it makes more sense from the standpoint of who gifted programs are supposed to serve. Be proactive about equity.
Any program selection process will miss some students it should have identified. In assessment, these are called false negatives. In some cases, this happens at random e.
Identification systems should be proactive in finding and eliminating such obstacles, making sure that no students are denied gifted services for the wrong reasons. In New York City, for example, some exam-based high schools used to require students to take the admissions test at the school on a particular day, but some students would always miss the test because they had no way to get to the testing site at that time. Similarly, New York and Boston now offer free test-preparation programs for students who cannot afford to pay for them, and Florida allows schools to adopt alternative identification policies for students who are non-native English speakers or are eligible for free or reduced-price meals.
Instead, identification systems need to take proactive, affirmative steps to find every student who would benefit from a GT program. Yet, as important as it is to be proactive about equity, we must avoid the temptation to comb the desert in search of the perfect identification process, one that ensures that the makeup of the students receiving GT services precisely mirrors that of the larger student population. The United States is a very unequal country, and as long as some students have access to every resource and privilege imaginable, while others struggle to find enough to eat, we will see unequal performance on any valid assessment, even if schools take proactive steps to identify students more equitably.
Be careful when using multiple measures. Experts in gifted education have long recommended using multiple measures or criteria to determine eligibility for advanced education National Association for Gifted Children, These include objective measures, such as standardized tests, but also subjective measures, such as performance assessments. But in recent years, it has become clear that such an approach can be harmful when implemented the wrong way.
For example, when Jonathan Plucker was a coordinator of enrichment programs in an elementary school, he was required to use a multiple criteria system in which students had to perform at a high level on every metric. As a result, very few students were identified for GT services, and the program lacked any race and class diversity. Further, using multiple criteria means using more measures, and those extra instruments e.
So how does one decide how to combine multiple measures? First, multiple criteria systems that require high performance on every measure are generally inappropriate, because, for most gifted services, the risk of negative outcomes due to an inappropriate placement is low. Systems should be designed to be inclusive — to err on the side of letting kids into a service rather than on keeping them out. In addition, educators should consider whether their additional measures are injecting more bias into their process, and whether that bias is helping or hurting the ability of the process to identify children in need of advanced services, and to do so equitably.
For example, teacher recommendations might help some disadvantaged students access services, but requiring a teacher referral could hold some students back. Every year, many students arrive at school working well above grade level, and some of them may need additional challenges, by way of accelerated courses, enrichment programs, or any of the many other strategies for providing a more rigorous education. We anticipate that this perspective will seem counterintuitive to many people, in that it flies in the face of a familiar line of criticism, which portrays gifted education programs as inherently elitist and inequitable.
Within the field of advanced education, we can only keep working hard to show that such criticism is wrong, and that if public education is to be truly equitable and effective, then it must find ways to meet the needs of all children, including those who are ready for greater challenges.
At the same time, we anticipate that our views will seem objectionable to others, especially those parents and educators who have had to fight hard over many years to get services for their very talented children and students, and who fear that a more inclusive approach will reduce or eliminate those services. To them, we can only reiterate that a more inclusive approach to gifted and advanced education, when designed and implemented carefully, will not remove services. The question is not whether our schools can provide such services to larger number of children, but whether our leaders are willing to provide the necessary resources.
Adelson, J. Gifted Child Quarterly, 56 1 , Bui, S. Is gifted education a bright idea? Assessing the impact of gifted and talented programs on students. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 6 3 ,
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